I wonder sometimes, though, which market is being served.

I think in some ways, it is actually the VC market itself that is being served, not the customers of the company the VCs are investing in.

There is so much VC money floating around, and they are 'in the market' for investments to make with that money. The problem is sometimes there just isn't a downstream market that needs to be served by a company funded with all that money, so the VC needs to try to find one. And they often times reach pretty far to find that investment opportunity, and try to force a downstream market where there is none.

There might not BE any market for the 'productized and supported' version of the open source project that a VC wants to fund, but since they have so much money they decide to try to force it to fit that model. They put a ton of money in, grow the company, and then are forced to monetize to support that big of a company.

Maybe the community was being served just fine without that much investment, but now that the investment has happened, the company is forced to act in ways that AREN'T serving that community.